See this beautifulĀ appreciation of Sydney Brenner by Peter Lawrence in DEVELOPMENT.
SGD turns 25!
25 years ago the SGD (The Saccharomyces Genome Database) went online.Ā Happy Birthday SGD!
SGD provides comprehensive integrated biological information for the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae along with search and analysis tools to explore these data, enabling the discovery of functional relationships between sequence and gene products in fungi and higher organisms.
WormBase collaborates with SGD and several other model organism databases to facilitate data harmonization and cross-species searches at theĀ Alliance of Genome Resources.Ā Check it out!
Short WormBase downtime yesterday
WormBase went down at 2.54pm ET yesterday. The problem was caused ironically by a fault recovery mechanism that was introduced recently. The fault recovery mechanism takes faulty servers out of service and replaces them with healthy ones. The process involves two components:the detection of faulty servers and the creation of new ones.
Two simultaneous problems in the two components lead to the failure. A false positive in detecting the faulty server caused the sever to be taken out of service, and a missing hard drive snapshot caused the failure to start new servers.
To avoid such future occurrences we are looking into ways to make the fault detection more specific and prevent important disk snapshots from being deleted by automated processes.
Most of the web services were restored around 5 pm ET. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.
New chapter in WormBook, GENETICS, on sensing of physical stimuli in C. elegans
Check out the new chapter in WormBook, GENETICS–‘How Caenorhabditis elegans Senses Mechanical Stress, Temperature, and Other Physical Stimuli‘ by Miriam Goodman and Piali Sengupta.
Tuesday, April 30th – early registration deadline for IWM 2019
Please note that Tuesday, April 30th is the deadline for early registration for the International C. elegans conference at UCLA.